Dubai door drop office

by Graham Dodd on 30/04/2014

Even when I’m on holiday, my thoughts sometimes turn to door drops almost certainly prompted by something which has caught my eye.

Sometimes it is an item in my Portuguese post box – the most unusual being a set of rosary beads in an envelope with some literature! – other times its been the fact that in Portugal, its quite common to see property consultants who manage property for owners abroad implement their own no junk mail sticker system.

I’ve been told it is to prevent the post boxes getting jammed full of items in the down season when house occupancy levels are at their lowest, but I’m not sure it always works, although it might just be somebody left a leaflet hanging out of course!

Recently I was in Dubai visiting my son and after several days noticed that he did not have a letterbox, nor did any of his neighbours.

In fact, as far as I could see, nobody on his estate had a letterbox, pretty much confirmed by him when he explained their PO Box system to me.

Over dinner we joked that there was no point in me setting up a Dubai office and leaving Neal to run the UK operation then, but he replied on the contrary, laughed and said wait and see.

The day after we returned to his house and he laughed, pointing vaguely in the direction of the house.

When I reached the front gate, there sitting on one of the spikes, was a little plastic bag containing a takeaway leaflet – I’ve also discovered that within the large ex pat community takeaways are unbelievable popular, but then again the choice of food is so wide – and looking around most of his neighbours’ gates, it seemed evident that most had already taken theirs in.

Over the next few days we had several more such deliveries, for other takeaways and local services, so there is a “door drop” market in Dubai.

But I could not help but think that in the UK such a technique would cause uproar.

If UK door drop service suppliers left items on gates (or on doorsteps, in porches, anything except fully through the letterbox) uproar can ensue.

But in Dubai its accepted and seemingly it works if the regularity of delivery is anything to go by.

Thinking about it though, a resident must see the bag – on my son’s estate the gates are all pretty much the same height and the bag was at eye level – so recall should be good and if you are just coming home from work, hungry and tired, a takeaway probably seems like a good idea!

Probably not true in all cases of course, but a little local research with my son’s friends seem to suggest it was not that wide of the mark!

I’m still wondering how they distribute to the flats in the Burj Khalifa though!

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